In all of this rambling you have fundamentally failed to understand any of what I said. You’re trying, but you can’t even begin to grasp the points, can you?
As you yourself point out, Phelps has been beaten, despite the unusual advantage given by his wingspan. And there are people who have failed to beat him despite having a greater advantage of wingspan. Both of which underscore exactly the point I was making; that ultimately these minutiae of biological differentials are meaningless. Yet you insist that they matter intensely, only and specifically when it comes to the subject of trans people playing sports. In any context we would write off factors like muscle-to-weight ratio and muscle distribution as valuable, but not something worth subdividing a sport over. But because this is about trans people, suddenly we must do everything in our power to prevent those factors from “unfairly” unbalancing the competition.
If you want teams to be divided by physiology, you will need to devise meaningful measures of physiology. But all of your arguments so far have just come down to gender essentialist claims that somehow dividing by sex is dividing by physiology. For every example where this is true, there as many where it is not. Human beings are infinitely complex creatures. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it here. If you want to make the claim that sports should be divided on physiological measures then you need to figure out what those physiological measures are, and accept that sometimes this will end up with XY and XX chromosomes competing against each other. And if that’s not a reality you’re willing to live with then you need to admit that all of this is just pearl-clutching transphobic nonsense.
I have a feeling you’re trying to say that dividing by XY/XX is too broad of a brush (which is why you think the wingspan thing is a great counter argument). But, sadly, broad the brush must be. It’s impossible to organise 8 billion sports competitions where you only compete against your exact genetic equal, aka yourself. Not having a perfect solution doesn’t mean you should opt for a worse one.
Also we do sometimes decide that XY and XX can compete against each other. Interestingly enough, we do this in cases where the physiological differences are unimportant. In most sports, for example, they are lumped together when it’s more meaningful to create age groups, and only split up when differences caused by sex become too large.
The weird argument at the end shows exactly the inverse of what you think it does. I don’t have any problem ‘accepting’ that they are grouped by physiology, and sometimes not, after deciding on measures we find meaningful. In fact, it is you who cannot accept this.
We’re where we started: Deep down you understand that there are meaningful reasons to divide categories on scientific factors, but at the end you decide to brush all that away because you believe that ‘being pro-trans on all fronts’, with a big emphasis on all, is more important.
You still haven’t even begun to grasp any of what I’m saying and at this point it’s clear that no amount of explanation on my part is going to change that.
Your claim that dividing categories by chromosomes will create meaningfully useful groupings is based on total ignorance of the actual science. But you obviously have no interest in correcting your ignorance, so ignorant you shall remain.
In all of this rambling you have fundamentally failed to understand any of what I said. You’re trying, but you can’t even begin to grasp the points, can you?
As you yourself point out, Phelps has been beaten, despite the unusual advantage given by his wingspan. And there are people who have failed to beat him despite having a greater advantage of wingspan. Both of which underscore exactly the point I was making; that ultimately these minutiae of biological differentials are meaningless. Yet you insist that they matter intensely, only and specifically when it comes to the subject of trans people playing sports. In any context we would write off factors like muscle-to-weight ratio and muscle distribution as valuable, but not something worth subdividing a sport over. But because this is about trans people, suddenly we must do everything in our power to prevent those factors from “unfairly” unbalancing the competition.
If you want teams to be divided by physiology, you will need to devise meaningful measures of physiology. But all of your arguments so far have just come down to gender essentialist claims that somehow dividing by sex is dividing by physiology. For every example where this is true, there as many where it is not. Human beings are infinitely complex creatures. You don’t get to have your cake and eat it here. If you want to make the claim that sports should be divided on physiological measures then you need to figure out what those physiological measures are, and accept that sometimes this will end up with XY and XX chromosomes competing against each other. And if that’s not a reality you’re willing to live with then you need to admit that all of this is just pearl-clutching transphobic nonsense.
I have a feeling you’re trying to say that dividing by XY/XX is too broad of a brush (which is why you think the wingspan thing is a great counter argument). But, sadly, broad the brush must be. It’s impossible to organise 8 billion sports competitions where you only compete against your exact genetic equal, aka yourself. Not having a perfect solution doesn’t mean you should opt for a worse one.
Also we do sometimes decide that XY and XX can compete against each other. Interestingly enough, we do this in cases where the physiological differences are unimportant. In most sports, for example, they are lumped together when it’s more meaningful to create age groups, and only split up when differences caused by sex become too large.
The weird argument at the end shows exactly the inverse of what you think it does. I don’t have any problem ‘accepting’ that they are grouped by physiology, and sometimes not, after deciding on measures we find meaningful. In fact, it is you who cannot accept this.
We’re where we started: Deep down you understand that there are meaningful reasons to divide categories on scientific factors, but at the end you decide to brush all that away because you believe that ‘being pro-trans on all fronts’, with a big emphasis on all, is more important.
You still haven’t even begun to grasp any of what I’m saying and at this point it’s clear that no amount of explanation on my part is going to change that.
Your claim that dividing categories by chromosomes will create meaningfully useful groupings is based on total ignorance of the actual science. But you obviously have no interest in correcting your ignorance, so ignorant you shall remain.